“I felt helpless”

A partner’s perspective on pelvic girdle pain 

We’d always wanted a third child, but we weren’t sure whether my wife, Laura, could cope with another pregnancy. She’d had PGP in both previous pregnancies. In the last trimester, she was barely able to walk, sit for any period of time or get any comfortable sleep. And now we had two small children to look after.

So here we were, mapping out a timeline in Excel, working out when I could take time off work and when our respective mothers could come to stay and help over what might be 3-4 months of incapacity.

Her first pregnancy

When Laura got pregnant with our first child, she had been determined to stay fit. She still walked 45 minutes to work, signed up for pregnancy fitness classes and did yoga most nights. But around 14 weeks, she started to slow down. Normally miles ahead and telling me to hurry up, she was the one lagging behind, struggling to walk without pain.

Things got slower and harder and I felt guilty that she was in that situation. I was also worried about the baby as I didn’t know at that time what was causing the pain. I looked up on NHS Choices and talked about it with friends who worked in healthcare. It helped me understand what it was but didn’t really relieve the anxiety.

Coping with kids and work

In the second and third pregnancies, we obviously had kids to deal with – I’d do most of the carrying and made sure to pick up shopping and bags. I was also worried about the kids seeing their mum in pain and not having the access to her that they should at such a young age. That meant I tried to make it easier for them to be with her when she was sitting or lying, like playing with them next to her, or sitting beside her on the sofa so we could read together, but I could stop them jumping on her.

Work got really hard for her in the second pregnancy. This was pre COVID and no one really worked at home. She was finding it increasingly difficult to walk from the train station to the office. We even talked about her driving into work, but the city centre parking was incredibly expensive, so in the end we had to reduce her hours at work and taper off her days well before the due date. So that meant we had to think carefully about our finances – but ultimately her health was more important. 

By the time we were considering a third child, I was more comfortable with the fact that she’d recovered twice before.  I knew there was a high chance that she’d go through all this pain again though, so we thought very hard about whether to even try.

By that time we’d found the Pelvic Partnership so we knew that treatment was available but we weren’t yet sure if we’d get it in our area (we’d recently moved). We made a plan as we knew that she wouldn’t be able to look after the kids on her own for the last few months. At the time I was travelling into work every day and getting home late. We planned for me to take intermittent days off so I could do more of the nursery runs. Then our son started school and the school let us use the disabled parking space so she could get in and drop him off. 

With advice from the Pelvic Partnership, Laura asked for a referral to the women’s health physio at her first midwife appointment. She felt much more confident in describing her symptoms and how PGP had affected her before but she still had to push quite hard to get the referral. She did, however, get to see a physio fairly early on . The physio wasn’t that familiar with PGP but was really willing to learn. Laura gave her the Pelvic Partnership leaflets and she gave Laura manual therapy which relieved her symptoms and massively improved her mental health. 

Tips for other partners

It’s very hard to see your partner in pain. My tips would be:

• Be empathetic. PGP is exhausting and can make your partner feel very low. Just being there and listening is really important.
• Don’t assume they can do the things they normally do. It’s not always obvious but even little things like bending down to pick up a toy or taking the bin out can become very difficult. Work with your partner to figure out how you can make daily life easier.
• Read through the information on the Pelvic Partnership website. I think it would have been helpful to know how other partners were feeling and what they did to help – there are lots of practical tips on here.

Knowing that there was specialist support available for Laura would have been helpful at the start – we found it in the end but I wish I’d known about it earlier. Treatment is available but not always easy to get, so be an advocate for your partner and support her to ask for the help she needs to recover.